Cookies
by Rphoenix
Summary: Heero needs his own personal therapist Duo gives it a shot.


"Heero."

I woke up on my feet, ready to fight and die. The lights were out, but there was enough moonlight coming in through the window to see Duo on the other side of the room, arms folded across his chest, sardonically staring down the barrel of my gun.

"Remember me? Duo, your totally non-threatening roommate?" He raised his hands over his head. "Better now?"

_False alarm_, I informed my body. It wasn't hard to get my breath under control, but my speeding heart obeyed more slowly, and I couldn't recall the adrenaline that coursed through my blood. I lowered my weapon.

Duo put down his hands, interlaced them behind his back, and stretched out his shoulders. "See if I ever do you another favor."

"What favor?"

"You were having a nightmare. I figured you wouldn't appreciate it if I shook you."

"I'd have killed you before I woke up." I replaced the gun beneath my pillow and flipped open my laptop.

Duo wandered over and peered over my shoulder. "What'cha doing?"

"Re-assigning my roommate. Don't stand so close."

I didn't have to turn around to feel him rolling his eyes at me, or to tell that he hadn't moved back, either.

"Learning to get along is supposed to be character-building, so there's no switches allowed," he pointed out. "If you hack in and make one, it'll attract more attention than most people want when they're undercover. Even more than brooding dramatically while being stalked by the ambassador's daughter."

When I hesitated, he pressed his advantage. "Next time I'll let you finish your bad dream, all right?"

I closed the laptop and glared at him. This time he backed up. One step. "When I was six years old, I was taught to sleep without making a sound. You shouldn't have woken me up on a lucky guess."

"Didn't need a sound. Your fists were clenched and the sweat was pouring off of you. … Six, huh? That's young for that sort of training."

"It's the perfect age to ingrain reactions."

Duo sat down on the edge of his bed. "The correct reaction when an ally you're bunking with quietly says your name from across the room is 'Hey, Duo, what's up?' If you're jumping out of your skin every thirty seconds, you're wasting energy you might need later. You want to relax when it's time to relax, then fight like hell when it's time to fight. Like me!"

I considered killing him. It seemed the simplest way to shut him up. But he was probably right about the perils of attracting attention while undercover, and a dead or even missing roommate would certainly do that. Also, we still had a mission to complete.

He went on, "Are you _trying_ to burn yourself out? Why did you unbuckle your parachute? Did you want to die, or just show off? Why did you set your own leg? Who does that?!"

"My bones are reinforced. A doctor would have noticed."

"You could have asked me to help. But you don't do that, do you?"

"I fight by myself, and I take care of myself."

"Really? And here I'd pegged you as a team player." Duo reached under his bedside table, pulled out a crumpled packet, and offered it to me. I shook my head. "Oatmeal, no raisins." He took out a cookie and munched it, flicking the crumbs off his blankets and in the direction of mine. "So you were doing heavy training when you were six, huh? What a shocker. My own childhood, of course, was nothing but fuzzy blankies and chocolate chip cookies."

I suspected that he was being ironic.

He held out the packet again. "Sure you don't want one? More for me. You must have grown up alone, except for your trainers. You only analyze people in terms of how you could take them down physically. But I grew up surrounded by friends and enemies. My life might depend on knowing how I could break a person, or what I could say to make them stronger."

He blew crumbs off his hand onto my bed. Annoyed, I brushed them back at him. He grinned at me. I realized his strategy then, and it impressed me: one simple prop to distract me with irrelevancies and make me think he had no serious intent, when all the while he was planting the seeds of… something. Trying to recruit me for a long-term team-up, probably.

"I told you, I prefer to work solo. This mission is a one-time-only thing."

"I have a feeling," he said around a mouthful of cookie, "This won't be the last time we're thrown together. Be nice if you were less of a liability to your own side."

"Treize tricked me once. It won't happen again."

"That's not what I meant. Since I came to Earth, I've blown up lots of stuff and rescued you. No injuries to myself, a little minor damage to Deathscythe, never been captured. In the same amount of time, you've crashed your Gundam, tried to blow it up and failed, pulled your gun on a schoolgirl, gotten shot, gotten captured, broken your leg on purpose, blown up some pacifists—OK, that one wasn't your fault— and deactivated those missiles and saved us all— that was good. My point is, your track record is a little erratic."

I got under the covers and put my head down on the pillow, hoping he'd take the hint.

Duo kept on babbling. "Like I said, while you were learning to be a maniac's idea of a perfect soldier, I was learning to pay attention to other people. You may sleep quietly but you don't sleep well. You can't tell the difference between a real threat and background noise. You do more damage to yourself than you do to the enemy. You can't bear to be touched unless you're wounded. I guess that was the only time anyone was ever gentle with you, huh? You're dying to pull the blanket over your head or turn your back to me or even close your eyes, but you can't, not as long as I'm awake, even though you know I'm not going to attack you. Heero… I could help with some of that. Make you a better soldier."

"The only thing that's ruining my sleep is you. I'm fine the way I am."

"Yeah? In that case, I'll put my hand on your shoulder. If you're fine, you won't flinch."

I threw off the covers and sat up. "If you touch me, I'll kill you."

"Thanks for proving my point." Duo grinned, more fierce than amused; he might smile like that while he swings his beam-scythe. "Not that you could."

He wasn't the only one who could read people. I saw the banked fury that underlay his campaign to fix me up and get more use out of me: not only anger at the enemies that he wanted to aim me at, but at me, as good a weapon as he'd ever seen, for turning my destructive power inward rather than outward. I could turn that rage to my own ends.

"Watch me." I knocked him off the bed. Cookies went flying.

I jumped over the bed, but he'd already rolled to the side. I landed next to him in a crouch, and turned toward his feint. In an instant, he had me face-down on the floor with his knee on my back and his forearm across my throat. I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow, taking care not to break anything. He grabbed my arm with his free hand and twisted it behind my back. I'd known he was good, with a rough style similar to my own, but he was stronger than I'd expected.

"I got— Ow!"

I'd jerked my head back, and smacked him fairly hard in the face. His holds loosened, but didn't break.

"Tap out, Heero, or I'll choke you out."

Digging my fingers into his forearm, I pulled it far enough away from my throat to gasp, "I'll kill you!"

He tightened his grip. I let go of his arm and reached backward, going for his eyes. His head jerked back, and he trapped both my arms in a lock. Then he applied more pressure to my throat. My vision started to gray out.

"Stop fighting, and I'll let you go!"

I struggled harder to distract him while I twisted my head to the side, turning his controlled choke-hold into a more dangerous one. He wasn't strong enough to snap my neck, but if my throat was in the right position, that wouldn't matter. Even Dr. J. had decided it was too risky to test how long I could go without oxygen. If Duo was angry enough, or frightened enough…

He wasn't. I woke up with carpet fibers and cookie crumbs prickling my cheek. Duo rolled me on to my back, supporting my neck, and felt around my throat. There was blood all over his face.

"Oh, so now it's OK for me to touch you…" He leaned over and listened to me breathe, then sat back on his heels. "You're fine. Wait, let me re-phrase that. You're completely fucked up, but your airway won't swell up and choke you to death."

_Too bad_, I thought.

He blotted his split lip with the back of his hand, but only succeeded in smearing the blood around. "Were you hoping I'd kill you, or did you just want me to pick you up, put you to bed, and give you some ice for your throat?"

Picked up sounded good. Ice sounded better.

He stood up. "Pick yourself up. I'm going to bed."

I didn't expect him to give up quite that easily, so I wasn't surprised when, a few minutes later, I heard a sleepy voice from the bed. "Hey, Heero, I'll make you one last offer, since I'm such a nice, forgiving guy. When I was a street kid on L2, a bunch of us lived in a squat with no heat. We used to sleep piled together for warmth, like a litter of puppies. Get your mind out of the gutter—we were little kids. Tell you the truth, it took me forever to learn how to sleep alone. You ever want a little human contact without getting yourself beat to hell to have an excuse, you just lie down next to me. I won't tell, I won't put the moves on you, and I won't wake up trying to kill you, 'cause I learned how to not do that."

He yawned, long and lazy. "I could teach you…"

When his breathing evened out, I got up and stood over his bed. I'd have woken up and taken down the intruder if anyone had done that to me, but he lay still, mouth open and the pillow damp around it, and not just with blood. I wouldn't put it past Duo to drool on purpose to trick me, but he seemed genuinely asleep.

I checked the lock on the door and the latches on the windows. Then I looked at Duo again. Had he been serious? I could not imagine myself climbing into bed with him, putting my arms around his warm body, and curling up like… like a puppy…

I lay down in my own bed, one hand clutching the gun under my pillow. Every time Duo shifted in his sleep or leaves rustled outside the window or a car drove by, a jolt went through my body and my heart rate sped up. I gave up trying to slow it down. The pillow got soaked with sweat, so I turned it over. Then I turned it over again. I wouldn't have believed that I could be so exhausted and tense at the same time, except that I'd always been this way. Duo thought he could teach me to be like him, but he hadn't been trained like me, or had the experiences I'd had. Even if he could take away my edge, then I'd be less alert and I'd miss something I should have caught and then there'd be even more disasters that I'd be responsible for.

When I closed my eyes, I saw corpses half-buried in rubble. If I kept my eyes closed, I might fall asleep. I was still awake when the sun rose and Duo, nine-tenths asleep, reached out to touch someone who wasn't there.


End file.
